Multimodality and polisemiosis: Producer’s, recipient’s or the analyst’s perspective?

Abstract

In this talk I want to shortly compare two approaches to communication oferred by Charles Forceville in his recent book Visual and Multimodal Communication (2020) and by Jordan Zlatev in his Motivation and Sedimentation Model (Blomberg and Zlatev in 2021; Devylder and Zlatev 2020) with respect to the following questions: (1) Do they analyse communicative acts from the perspective of text producers and/or reciepients or from the perspective of an analyst? (2) Are these perspectives distinct in the cognitive linguistic and cognitive semiotic research? (3) How can we include the producers and recipients in our analyses? (4) What are the (dis)advantages of this inclusion? I will discuss these question on the examples of multimodal / polisemiotic analyses of language, gesture, images, memorials and three dimensional art.